{"id":10619,"date":"2015-08-20T21:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T21:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10619"},"modified":"2015-08-20T21:01:22","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T21:01:22","slug":"recalling-a-brief-but-life-changing-episode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10619","title":{"rendered":"Recalling a brief, but life-changing episode"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"ov-1dmo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Forty-five years ago today, I piled into my 1961 Plymouth Valiant — the first car I ever owned — and started the drive down Interstate 5 to my hometown of Portland, Ore.<\/p>\n

I said “good bye” to the U.S. Army, where I had served precisely two years.<\/p>\n

An Army acquaintance who also lived in Portland asked if he could ride along. I agreed, so we took off together from Fort Lewis, Wash.<\/p>\n

The drive lasted only about three hours. It was uneventful. I took him to his house and then proceeded to my parents’ house in suburban east Multnomah County.<\/p>\n

It was a heck of a two-year hitch. It was my first time away from home; it provided me with my first visit to the East Coast, where I completed my advanced individual training as an OV-1 Mohawk aircraft mechanic.<\/p>\n

Then came a trip across the Pacific Ocean to Vietnam, where I participated for a time in a war.<\/p>\n

I returned home and was assigned to an armored cavalry unit in Fort Lewis, where I finished my tour.<\/p>\n

Two years … to the day!<\/p>\n

Any regrets about any of that? No regrets<\/em>, per se.<\/p>\n

I do, though, rue somewhat a missed opportunity to see what I was really made of. I don’t talk much about it in my wife’s presence, because if I had said “yes” to this chance, our paths wouldn’t have crossed upon my return to college in January 1971.<\/p>\n

It involved officers candidate school. Near the end of my basic training at Fort Lewis,\u00a0four other guys and I received orders to report to the company commander’s office. He then told us we had tested well enough for acceptance into OCS.<\/p>\n

He proceeded to tell us about the hell we would go through. “You think this was tough?” he said. “Wait’ll you have to go through OCS. Sixteen weeks of it.”<\/p>\n

Well, I was in good physical and emotional\u00a0condition. I felt at that moment as though I could kick the world in the backside. I was ready for anything. None of that physical stuff bothered me in the least.<\/p>\n

Then came the deal-breaker. He told us we would have to commit to two years as a commissioned officer upon completion of our training. I rolled that around. That meant I’d be in the Army another four months longer than I had planned.<\/p>\n

I turned to the Old Man and said, “No thank you, sir.”<\/p>\n

That was that. Yes, I have wondered about the kind of officer I would have become. I believe I’d have been a good one … but that’s just me.<\/p>\n

I finished my time and returned home a good bit different — and a lot better — than I was when I left the house in the wee hours of the morning two years earlier.<\/p>\n

Time has flown by ever since and life has been so very good.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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Forty-five years ago today, I piled into my 1961 Plymouth Valiant — the first car I ever owned — and started the drive down Interstate 5 to my hometown of Portland, Ore. I said “good bye” to the U.S. Army, where I had served precisely two years. An Army acquaintance who also lived in Portland … Continue reading Recalling a brief, but life-changing episode<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[5362,5361,4944,5116],"class_list":["post-10619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-news","tag-fort-lewis-wa","tag-officer-candidate-school","tag-u-s-army","tag-vietnam-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10619"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10622,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10619\/revisions\/10622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}